Good Culture and Precariousness

How best can we identify and foster culture capable of promoting well-being among seriously disadvantaged, alienated groups in societies in which ‘success’ requires individual aspiration and exposure to socio-economic insecurity? This question has been examined through a comparative, participatory, cross-cultural research project involving academics from a range of backgrounds and non-academic community co-researchers from Ashington, Northumberland and Aboriginal groups around Brisbane, Australia. The project applies and examines the theoretical claims of ‘good culture’ outlined in Evaluating Culture (Johnson 2013) which hold that we must always uphold values of solidarity, equality and non-domination in order to avoid harm, whatever other values we pursue and in whatever conditions we pursue them. ‘Good culture’ promotes eudaimonic well-being by tailoring lives to specific contexts, shaping environments and resisting reckless individualism, inequality and domination.

This programme examines ‘good culture’ in the context of ‘lumpenprecariat’ groups, which are seriously excluded and alienated even from ‘precarious’ forms of employment and experience often predictable forms of drudgery.